the fount of information for our greater Baltimore/Annapolis area book club

Welcome to Storie delle Sorelle

Welcome to the blog for SdelleS. To learn more about our book club check out my first blog entryor read about our members. Or check out our ReadingGroupGuides.com interview here! Using the links to the right, you can browse the books we've read and rated or visit some of my favorite sites for book clubs on the web. How about some questions to consider as you read a book? This site is meant to provide a wealth of information for all readers so I hope you enjoy your visit! Please post a comment or contact me with any questions or thoughts. :)

Tuesday, October 9

The Mists of Avalon

When it was my turn to choose a book, I quickly came up with Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. This is one of my all-time favorite books ... and I knew the girls would never read it on their own! The book is about 800 pages long so we took two months to read it., finishing in January 2007.

Some main topics of discussion were:

the author's personal beliefs about religion and how they influenced the book

the difference between this story and the standard King Arthur tale

the conflict between doing your duty, doing what is right and doing what you want to do - which characters did we admire?

English history in general and the druidic culture specifically

Nancy found it useful to print a list of characters and use this to help her keep things straight as she read. And Bev made an interesting observation. She had never read anything about the tribal people of England, or the small kingdoms that used to exist. She said that reading this book actually helped her to understand her Bible reading better. The Old Testament refers to all sorts of kingdoms and this didn't click with her until she read about the same type of thing in this book. Wow - you never know WHAT you might learn from a book! :)

I was very proud of the girls for making it through this long (and to some, very hard) book. Seven of us participated in the discussion and we voted as follows: 2, 6, 8, 9x2 and 10x2. The official rating was 7.7. I was pretty impressed - I thought they were really going to hate it!